#81 – Which Page Builder is Right For Your Site?

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This week Gael is joined by Lewis for his first appearance on the podcast.

Lewis has been a writer for Authority Hacker for the past six months. His main job is doing the review content. Basically, we buy him some tools, he plays about with them for a month or so and then writes up what he thinks.

Mixed up in there are a whole bunch of experiments to get a real working experience of what the tools can and cannot do in the real world.

Over the past few years, we have used Thrive Content Builder extensively and recommend it to our members as the best tool to help grow their sites.

However, recently there have been a number of new entrants to the market along with some of the more established players updating their offerings. We noticed that, in certain areas, TCB was starting to lag behind the competitors.

So, with Thrive Architect being released this week, we are going to be discussing page builders in detail to find out what is the best builder to grow your site.

What is a Page Builder?

A page builder is a design tool in the form of a WordPress plugin.

It gives you a visual environment to build your site (usually using drag and drop elements) without worrying about complex code.

It makes it easy to create buttons, columns, tables or whatever else design elements you want to use to make your content more useful for your readers and better than the competition.

Page builders allow you to work within the page itself rather than using the WordPress default editor. This allows you to make edits and view them immediately rather than make a change, view the preview, adjust it slightly, view another preview and so on until you are happy.

No, what page builders do is to render the page the same way it would show for the end user, while you are editing the post.

What Happens if the Developers Go Out of Business?

These are private companies in the tech space. Some of them will fail, it is inevitable. So, you have to be very careful about tying your fortunes to a private company that could go out of business.

This is especially important to consider if you are creating evergreen content. Some of this content can still be ranking and making money 10 years down the line.

But, if you think about it, 10 years is a lifetime in the tech industry. There are no guarantees that any of these companies will still be around in that time.

So, it is important to examine what happens to the content if this were to happen.

In some cases, if a page builder goes out of business or the company stops maintaining the builder, it can render your existing content completely useless. All it leaves is a mess of nonsensical WordPress shortcodes – we’re looking at you Visual Composer.

However, some of the builders preserve your content well. These companies have ensured that the pages are put together in such a way that they are compatible with the default WordPress editor. They are not perfectly preserved by any means but it is still a workable solution.

Does it Slow Down Your Website?

Some page builders can produce what is known as bloated code. This essentially means that it takes them 10 lines of code for an element that should take 3 or 4 lines of code.

This translates to your browser taking longer to render the visuals and slows down the site.

You want a page builder that focuses on producing lean code. Code that is efficient and doesn’t force the browser to jump through hoops will lead to faster load times.

The two best page builders at doing this are Elementor and Thrive Architect.

How Do They Work With Other Plugins?

In most cases, the page builders work relatively well with other plugins.

However, you cannot edit the plugins directly in the page builder. The shortcode will render but any management or changes that are required will have to be done within the traditional WordPress environment.

As long as there is no complicated JavaScript and the plugin is managed from WordPress then it is unlikely that there are going to be any issues.

Do Page Builders Affect SEO or Prevent You From Ranking in Google?

Page builders themselves will not stop you from ranking in Google but there is a school of thought that any unnecessary code will slow your site down and Google likes fast sites. Therefore, page builders affect rankings.

But, we don’t necessarily believe that page speed is a major factor in SEO. In Gael’s mind, page-speed is a ranking factor but it’s around 1% of the algorithm. SEO practitioners spend a disproportionate amount of time talking about page-speed compared to the actual impact it has on rankings.

If you think about it, page builders spit out HTML in the same way a coder would.

Yes, if you hire a bad coder who has bloated code then it will negatively affect your rankings. The same applies for page builders.

On the flip side, the added visual elements and additional engagement with users that page builders create is a positive for SEO. It can also make building links easier because people love pretty things.

How Were the Page Builders Tested?

The first step for Lewis was to make a shortlist of the most popular page builders at the moment. After doing some research, we settled on the following:

On the plus side, it’s cheap. It only costs $40 but this is with a single site, non-commercial license.

On the negative side, the interface is very minimal yet still manages to be confusing. There are a lot of redundant elements to fill up the library and then there is a premium library where you pay for additional elements – such as an undo button.]

It feels like they reel you in with a cheap product and then proceed to upsell you for anything more than the very basics.

It is also very slow, you constantly have to wait for elements to load.

The crazy thing about Elementor is that they have a really good free version available. Although the Pro version has some additional elements, the free version is a pretty good alternative.

The main positives of Elementor are:

Clean

Well designed – the elements look much better than they do on Thrive Architect

Easy to use

Fast

Lots of elements and lots of customization

The main drawbacks are:

No inline text editing – you have to edit the text from the sidebar

Inability to combine elements – There is a complicated workaround but there is no easy way to combine or nest elements

Building an email list – It does not have integrations with other tools or plugins that easily allow you to build a list.

Update

It looks like Elementor plugs into a new opt in plugin called mailoptin which makes list building a bit better but still far inferior AND more expensive than the Thrive suite.

The general consensus is that we love what Elementor does but it is not aimed at people making money from content on their site, it is more aimed at brick and mortar businesses that are looking to generate an inquiry through a contact form.

Hey, I'm Danny! I write full-time for Authority Hacker. I came from a background of more traditional marketing before I started work for a large affiliate marketing site a couple of years ago. Now I travel the world, write, market and watch sports!

Hi Danny,
I’m Ben CMO of Elementor. Thanks for the kind words! You mentioned Undo so you should know this week we added a free undo button that’s really cool. Regarding combining elements, this can easily be done using our columns widget, and is actually used quite commonly throughout our templates.

Regarding email list, you should check out the recently released MailOptin. It integrates seamlessly to Elementor and offers a simple connect to all the popular email services.

Again, I’m glad you liked our page builder. Keep updated because next week we have a special release that is geared towards marketers

Thanks for dropping by and precising things we may not have seen at the time. The undo button is great! It was much needed IMO, not if you could also make ctrl z work that’d be nice ;).

Concerning combining elements what we meant was more putting stuff inside other elements like the tab widget example we gave. Would that work with collumn layouts?

As for Mailoptin, yep, it’s a start but still far inferior to what Thrive Leads offers both in terms of integration, testing and flexibility IMO.

Overall we love what Elementor does and you clearly raised the bar when it comes to page builders, plus, the free version of the plugins lets anyone have a great page builder which is a first on that market.

a) The comments made on the podcast about being at least somewhat at the mercy of the page builder company (which I didn’t realise) made me think, “well, if that’s a risk with these builders – and if that’s acceptable to the user – doesn’t that also open up the possibility of using NON-Wordpress builders?”

i.e. Really the only thing I’ve had against using Squarespace and similar is the aspect of these being private companies. Whereas (at least as far as I know) – with Squarespace and Weebly you can actually keep backups that can convert to WordPress should you ever need to (correct me if I’m wrong though).

Anyway – thoughts on the Non-Wordpress builders?

b) You know you’re going to get requests to review other builders, don’t you? :)
Mine is: Could you please test and review BoldGrid (built on WordPress) and available through inmotion hosting (and I think a couple other places). Please?

a – yes, I guess the dilemma is comparable, still, because WordPress is open source the risks of it going under are lower than a company like Wix or Squarespace, plus, you get so much choice and flexibility that going out of WordPress would most likely feel constraining to us.

b – If there is demand / popularity for builders we’ll do more reviews, we do need to juggle with limited resources though so we do our best :).

But i think you missed the better thing about Divi. Since version 3 they added the front end editor, with a list of all elements in the sidebar. You can edit the text directly on that front-end, add, remove, change, relocate and make virtually anything you want. You need no more that ugly backed editor full of blocks.

If you want A/B testing, then you need the backend to edit them.

And for optins on Divi you need to rely on Bloom – also from Elegant Themes- or any other plugin. No big difference with Thrive Archtect, since for optins you need Thrive Leads.

I think that your reviews are ok, but you made not justice whith Divi.